TRAFFIC COUNTS! 

The Elusive Truth at Amazon KDP

16 August 2021

By David Arthur Walters

Open publishing entities on the Internet have provided the means for anyone to publish content on various platforms. First of all, independent authors want to attract attention to their work, and that is benefit enough for the overwhelming number of writers today despite dreams of becoming rich and famous with bestselling stories. So it is not surprising that, with the curious exception of Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, open publishing companies are glad to tell independent writers, free of charge, how much traffic their posts have had, because those “hits” or clicks are non-monetary benefits that encourage producers to provide content. After all, who would say anything at all if there were no indication of being heard by anyone at all? One might as well be talking to a cactus in Arizona! So traffic counts whether authors are selling their work or giving it away.

Authorsden is my favorite open publish site for authors for several reasons, one reason being the helpful and innovative attitude of Matthew Miller, the owner, not to mention the presence of fine writers with genuine concern for their peers. Another is the fact that traffic counts: I have received 1,743,546 hits on my work as of this writing, and that without doing anything at all except posting articles. My most popular post, with 37,963 hits is 'Get Your Free Doctorate In Political Science!” I see that “The Goddess Trivia” has 11,371 hits. And there is 'Compassion Zone Putas' with 16,397, and 'Hola Cabron' with 10,368. 'Mary McElroy, City Manager's Daughter' has 20,793, and my 'Equinox Fitness Consumer Review has '37,252. The amazing thing is that the numbers continue to build over time. Elsewhere, such as the free Wordpress program, there is very little traffic to begin with unless you spend half the day “trading clicks” and otherwise interacting with other posters, and the traffic drops to almost zero when you walk away.

Now Amazon has made posting a book on its publishing site as easy as posting an article in a e-zine. If a writer does not understand how to create a book in Word, he can download a formatting program, Kindle Create, onto his computer, upload his Word document, follow a few easy steps, and, Wallah, he will have a book to upload to KDP. Amazon's KDP provides a pyramidal bookshelf infinite in size upon which self-publishers can place their books and market them to the best of their abilities. Millions of books have already been shelved and millions are to come, but just how many each month was a trade secret the last time I checked; now that almost everyone is a writer, they might be discouraged if they knew how much competition they have.

I used Kindle Create to quickly put up 40 of my books, mostly anthologies, on KDP, using a book cover provided by KDP. I figured that my books would be safe on Amazon and that its KDP facility would last decades, so my heirs could do whatever they wanted to with my books; ed it them, get different covers, promote them, etc. Writing for me is a way of learning. I have never been interested in selling my work let alone make a living as an author, and that allows me to speak freely within civilized norms. Besides, there are a lot more certain ways of making a living than writing for the market.

Since I had nearly 100 books almost ready to publish, I decided to number the volumes and use the same free KDP cover template on almost all of them. For that I selected the simple book cover with an image of a bolt of lightning descending upon a city scene at night. My KDP colleagues, however, have criticized me for using a free template and said I should learn how to design covers or pay for attractive different covers for each volume at a cost of hundreds or even thousands of dollars. I am told the lightning bolt cover is the ugliest free template of all. Well, then, I thought, it is a distinctive brand.

Each Amazon KDP author has a free dashboard reporting activity on his account. When I looked at the KDP Dashboard, I noticed there were no statistics reported for how many clicks I was getting on the free advertisements on the Amazon search engine. I began to wonder if the platform had any value at all in itself in terms of traffic unless the author bought into the schemes offered by its advertising department; therefore I presented KDP with this simple question:

“I do not see, under REPORTS, an accounting of the number of 'hits' or 'clicks' my book advertisements receive. Please advise me. Thanks.” 

Amazon KDP Customer Service referred me to its Amazon Advertising Team, where I was told the traffic count I was interested in was not provided by Advertising unless advertisements were paid for. I was referred back to KDP, and KDP referred right back to Advertising, so I clarified my question: I wanted to know where to find traffic counts on the free advertisements KDP provides its authors on the Amazon website. KDP referred me to its “Community” forum for an answer. The Amazon KDP Community blog, I noticed when I briefly audited it, provides a forum for writers to help each other, especially with technical matters, and much of the conversation I audited did appear to be helpful.

I soon discovered that the KDP Community uses Social Credit algorithms to rank the “reputation” of participants. Social Credit systems are fundamentally brownie-point systems initially conceived in Asia and once employed in the Legalist period of Imperial China and now in Communist China to control the vast population. The ratings are subject to manipulation by the ruling authorities who devise and propagate the moral standards they desire. Persons who cooperate for credits are benefited; those who receive few credits or accrue too many offsetting demerits suffer. So the Social Credit systems are reward and punishment systems that blacklist and whitelist community members, infringing on their right to reputation, privacy, and dignity, while, of course, suppressing dissent. The KDP Community Social Credit system is meaningful to authors who have ample time to hang out in the forum and earn reputation points, and to sales persons with book-related businesses who hope to pick up some bookmaking business. Amazon publishes its Community forum on the World Wide Web. I was warned by one Ding Ling, a participant in my Traffic Counts forum, that I would be embarrassed on the Web after I disagreed with his opinion. Indeed, defamatory and false information is published there instead of keeping the discussions among the participants.

Since KDP authors share revenue with Amazon and other participants in the forum derive income from Amazon operations, they are virtual albeit not legal partners in the business, The Community platform appears to be owned and operated by Amazon on behalf of all concerned, and its anonymous moderators are probably Amazon employees. My inquiries to KDP in that regard were not responded to by press time.

The impertinent and libelous responses of Ding Ling (7,986 reputation points) an anonymous Community respondent who commented on my question about missing statistics for authors who do not pay Amazon for advertisements, and the fact that Amazon publishes its forums on the worldwide Web and did not answer my information about his libels, caused me to reasonably suspect that he is a KDP troll operating as such with the consent of KDP management. He dismissed my question about statistics on the free Amazon ads as “premature,” and characterized me as “loony, ignorant, juvenile and pathetic,” my books as mispriced, incoherent, “self-indulgent ramblings” with “amateurish” covers, and noted that I failed to buy my own books in order to get ranked by Amazon.

“We used to get these crazies coming in here every two or three months before the pandemic, and then during the height of the pandemic, a new one would show up almost every two weeks. One wrote in broken English believing he had written the next best thing to the bible and believing his English was perfect. Another who thought he was the next messiah -seriously-, and yet another who priced his poorly written e-books at $249.99 and was demanding the royalties owed to him. There are so many that memories of them mix together. But I do remember one who would tried to respond to his thread's replies with poetry. Oh, oh and then there was the sumo wrestler with bogus credentials who claimed to have wrestled a shadow figure.. and won. Yup, a shadow figure. For some reason and maybe it's the same with all forums, we occasionally get the crazies coming in here looking for some needed attention. They tend to stay for a week or so before wondering off to who knows where.”

Ding Ling's commentary was irrelevant to my question, which he preferred to avoid in order to exercise his usual critical presidency of forums, over which he seems to constant hover in order to teach people lessons. Remaining anonymous, however, detracts from his authority because his own failure or success as a writer remains unexamined. Still, since he seems to know how that Amazon machine works, it might behoove him to write a bestselling book about that under his real name and sell it to the “newbies” in the forum instead of arrogantly despising them.

I seldom criticize the work of my fellow writers unless invited to do so, and then I prefer constructive criticism, a technique that does not attack the author as “pathetic” and “ignorant” and so on. Instead, I hold up for comparison an example of better or more ethical thinking and therefore writing. And that allows me to hawk my own wares, so to speak. That being said, I will, when personally attacked, respond to the occasion with what intelligent critics have called my dangerous intelligence. Even so, I would not hold my negative opinion of the person against his work. Quite frankly, some fine writers have been and are foul characters and even criminals—I am thinking of a bank robber, now, who wrote a great book while on the run.

Ding Ling and other Community members were apparently incensed by my humorous reference, in response to his arrogance, to myself as the “Greatest Author The World Will Ever Or Never Know,” and my reference to my “brilliant” and “superior” writings. The title is one I coined twenty years ago to encourage myself and colleagues who are really writers to be true to their kind and “write themselves to death” despite the attacks of harpies and magpies and poltroons hiding behind false names, as did a character in one of my short stories, which was praised as “brilliant” by reputable critics. To be a brilliant writer, one must study the best authors and transcend and ignore vicious conduct such as that offered by Ding Ling; the only writing he reveals are his or her self-portraits in the Amazon forum. This transcendental or superior approach may offend those who falsely affect humility, which is really demonstrative of their false pride because they would love to be called “brilliant” and “superior” writers.

Ding Ling, out of his obsession with material success, not understanding that writers who write for money alone are writing for the Machine and are not really worth reading, proudly calls me, without having a clue to my identity, a “failed writer,” which is obviously disproved by my every word unto my dying breath. He speaks of writers who blame the Machine for their “failure” because he loves the Machine that affords him with a Community to compete for domination, so the Machine owns Ding Ling. He apparently conceals his identify with an alias because he has an inferiority complex that motivates unethical criticism, even defamation per se by negative reference to the “mental health” and presumed professional incompetence of his colleagues, behavior that reflects very badly on Amazon itself because the enterprise sanctions the derogation by allowing it to proceed apace, eventually blaming the victim for the abuse. And it is behavior that exposes Amazon itself to lawsuits, and Ding as well, for his identity is discoverable by legal process.

I asked Beach Garden, who had 5,689 reputation points at the time, why so many participants in the Community forum, like Ding Ling, were hiding behind pen names. Hitch of Book Nook answered for him or her.

“For the same reason that the majority of profiles are not; because Beach Garden values his or her privacy. There have been extremely unfortunate incidents here, with unstable authors going bonkers and then running around posting bad reviews on the books of anyone that dares say something that they don't want to hear, about their own books. For example, Author A posts a thread: 'Why isn't my book selling?’ And if told that the cover is godawful, or that the writing could be better, lashes out, becomes infuriated and then starts review-bombing anyone they can find in the forums. It's happened here for years. That's why there are actually exceedingly FEW identifiable authors here with linked books.”

What is missing is the other side of the story. Aliases allow irresponsible persons with dubious knowledge to attack others with impunity. And that is encouraged when Amazon moderators condone the attack by locking down the conversation, accusing the victim of abuse for responding moderately in person, and then publishing the accusation on the World Wide Web, thus habitually enforcing bad conduct. The problem is, as Eugene 'Luigi' Faccuito liked to say to his jazz dancers, “If you do wrong long enough, wrong seems right.”

Ding Ling was moved to anonymously down-rate my book, Open Publishing, after I mentioned it constituted my research into the open publishing industry.

“Top reviews from the United States. 1 out of 5 stars. Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2021. “Incoherent ramblings. The author's writing is disconnected and nonsensical. I've heard more sensical stories from a 2 year old.”

On the other hand, Prof Dave (1,072 points) commenting anonymously on my question, said, “It would be quite nice if Amazon provided information on a dashboard about how many impressions our book covers had, and how many page visits. It would help us gauge how well specific books were performing, or whether some books were failing to convert from page visits to sales. It may even be to Amazon's interest because it would give people useful baseline figures so they can see just how much more visible their book was if they make use of Amazon Marketing. I suspect the reason Amazon does not give this information is the vast majority of independently published books, in the absence of any form of marketing, there are zero impressions and zero page visits. And then Amazon would have to deal with authors complaining that no one was finding their book.”

Spinner, with 7,685 reputation points, thought I was looking for what he called “some elusive truth,” that being the truth from Amazon about the activity on the book covers and pages in its free ads for all authors. His only concern was sales numbers. He said his “sales are totally unpredictable” from month to month at Amazon and Apple, and Amazon “advertising doesn't even come into it” because he does not use Amazon advertising.

Prof Dave said he was “not sure the truth is particularly elusive. There are literally millions of books of books published independently published on Amazon, and literally millions of them never sell more than a half dozen copies. It stands to reason that in general, Amazon does not put those books at the top of people's searches. However, if you produce something good, and market it well, either external to Amazon or on Amazon, you can do remarkably well... A bit more data on page impressions would be nice, but, equally, it is not going to be a major factor in turning books into a runaway success!”

He had the “elusive truth.” I had found it impossible to get a straight answer to what really is a simple question from Amazon unless you pay for service from the Amazon advertising team. If you pay, you play. The platform is virtually worthless in the financial sense unless you supply content and market it. It is what it is, and that is its privilege, but it would be better for everyone concerned if the truth were told and traffic were transparent. Why not? Amazon is the ultimate development of open publishing; perhaps we would fain to deny that it is a money-making machine that thrives on vanity?

Kimberly “Hitch” Hitchens (11,995 reputation points—referred to as Book Nook above) the owner of Booknook.biz, an “Amazon listed” e-book formatting and production boutique based in Arizona that has two full time crews and produces 1,500 books annually for indie and best-selling authors, addressed the meaning of “elusive” and “illusive.”

"'Elusive' means, hard to pin down. 'Illusive' means hallucinatory, deceptive, or from a deluded mind. They are two very different words, despite being homonyms and frequently and erroneously confused. Nobody here told you that the advertising program, clicks, etc. were illusive or illusory. Elusive--hard to pin down, for the reasons I mentioned--yes. Illusory? No. The only person here who said that was you and frankly, you're mistaken.”

I respond semantically here, at risk of seeming ludicrous, because Amazon KDP locked down the Traffic Counts forum and a related forum because its secret Amazon moderator deemed my question and reasoning on the importance of traffic counts disruptive and offensive. In fact one participant ridiculed me for being reasonable by definition.

A search of the forum thread for “illusive,” which is rooted in ludere ('to play'), as is “elusive,” indicates that Hitch is the only commentator who first used “illusive,” and that Spinner, as demonstrated above, first used “elusive.” That is not to say that I believe she was deluded, or that I would mind if I had been the first person to use either term. Grammarians allude to the changing common meanings of words over time, and the two words have at times been confused. We speak metaphorically when we say truth eludes us, as truth is not an entity with legs of its own. Someone might, however, be hiding the truth about, for example, unnamed Amazon executives; perhaps Jeffrey Bezos himself, so I shall ask him about it.

Speaking figuratively, we ask, “Do the traffic counts elude us because they do not exist? Are the traffic counts provided by other open publishing companies’ illusions, like the oases thirsty people see in deserts?”

Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Some who have lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down through the illusive medium...have seen...the undoubted source of the Styx.” I have likened my books to coffins I have set afloat on the river named after Styx, mother of Power, Emulation, Victory and Might. At least my souls would be rendered invulnerable to attacks from the likes of Ding Ling in the Stream of Woe if I swore upon the goddess protected by Zeus and placed my name as my token on each coffin to pay the ferryman.

Hitch raised doubt in my mind as to whether the data I asked for was even available, so I persisted with my question.

"I'm still a bit boggled by the idea,” she said, “that you thought that Amazon, or ANY company, could tell you how many hits or clicks you would get, in advance of you advertising your own books.”

“There should be a conversion rate of clicks to sales on the basic Amazon ads,” I said, “so you seem to insist that that data, how many clicks on a particular book ad, is unknown by Amazon period. So that I, for example, will never know what traffic I got on my book, The Amazonian Community, so I could ascertain the effectiveness of my presentation.”

I persisted with my notion that Amazon does have the data and could report it without its authors paying for its pay-for-click program. I informed her that KDP finally had responded to me, saying it would consider my inquiry as a suggestion and refer it upstairs.

Hitch said we were talking about “Apples and Oranges,” and said that, yes, the data was there.

"Amazon has been harangued for the page hits, etc. since 2009 and they haven't released it yet and I don't see any advantage to them to do so."

Maybe not if the KDP platform was worthless as a mere bookshelf, I thought. Yet I believe it would be, first of all, an incentive to writers to have their books on the shelf virtually touched, something they are not aware of in a brick and mortar library. That would encourage them to provide more content, some of which might be fine works that wind up being sold instead of buried at the bottom of the Amazon pyramid. And it would be to Amazon's advantage to provide information that would improve the ability of the authors, the partners with whom it splits book income, to market their books.

“I've dealt with Amazon, very closely, since 2009 now,” she said. “I know what sort of changes or adjustments they are willing to make, and which they are not. They're NOT going to release page views—in fact, they took steps to eliminate the tracking dot strategies that people used from 2010 to2012, as that's their business. They've made sure that publishers cannot include images that track hits, dots, any of that, since around 2012. If they were going to embrace the idea of telling you "we get 200 million hits/day, they would [have done so already.]

Hitch is obviously a far better Amazon representative than Ding Ling. She insists she does not work for Amazon. Of course she and the authors are not Amazon partners in a legal sense. She uses her real name hence is personally liable for what she says and does. She is a credentialed or “listed” Amazon vendor although Amazon is careful to say it lists specialists for informational purposes only and “Amazon does not endorse or sponsor any service provider, nor recommend one over another.”

I have examined Hitch's publicized credentials and discovered she ran project management teams for nine years, building 5-star hotels like the Scottsdale Princess, the Four Seasons at Troon, and 3-4-star hotels such as the Amara Resort, as well as the renovation of many older classic properties Although she has done nothing for me, I highly recommend her services on that basis as well as the fact that she resides where I was born and is under similar astronomical influences. I am an author, not a professional publisher and bookmaker. As such, I only wish that she, and editor and a publisher found enough value in my work to invest their resources in production and publication for the lion's share of any profits. That sort of arrangement would return me to the good old days of rejection slips and compliments with advice from editors with mainstream publishers. Alas, that writers have always been on the bottom of the publishing totem pole. Even after copyright was created, it was the publishing monopoly and not the writers that had the right.

Beach Gardener, who has 5,689 reputation points, commented, that “The vast majority of author/publishers will not find the info you are seeking the least bit useful even if it is passing fair interesting. Amazon advertising does provide a wide range of—in my opinion—basically useless stats of interest only to number crunchers, but you do have to be running ads to get them.”

C. Dale Brittain, with 26,173 reputation points, a professor of medieval history and notable American author of fantasy novels and My Guide To Knowing Your Self Publishing, commented on the illusion that traffic counts on the free Amazon book-cover ads would be important, and she provided important information about free promotional devices such as discounts and giveaways.

“Amazon does not tell us how many people clicked on a link to our book or viewed the book's sales page without buying. They prefer to keep that info to themselves. If you are signed up for Amazon advertising, you get a dashboard that will tell you how many people clicked on an ad for your book to go to the sales page. But you obviously don't get an advertising dashboard if you aren't signed up for advertising.... If you aren't advertising, knowing how many people viewed your book's page but didn't buy isn't all that useful anyway. All that really counts are sales. Dropping the price to 99c may increase your sales somewhat but not a lot unless you're promoting the price drop. Giving the book away for free is pretty pointless....”

That raises the unanswered question as to whether there exists any scientific statistical proof that, not only Amazon's free promotional gimmicks, but its paid advertising program, really has much value to authors. Amazon considers the KDP authors as publishers. The publishers produce and put books on its virtual shelf. It has the advantage of being able to tell authors which books are touched and how many times, but it withholds that information from the self-publishers. It is up to them to promote and sell their books whether they are part of the KDP internal program or not. Millions of books are already on the shelf, and authors compete for traffic and sales from which Amazon gets a big cut. The winners are presumably determined by the market, the crowd, but its behavior is manipulated because the content providers game the system of proprietary computer algorithms or automatic procedures that rank the books according to popularity, best sellers, and so on, with results that entice the crowd to follow the leaders regardless of the critical quality of the product. What we have here is a huge moneymaking machine that does little of the work, and does most of that robotically for most of the money. I could not find an accounting of that money in Amazon's latest annual report, and its Public Relations firm did not respond to my request for it by press time. The KDP authors work for the Machine, not vice versa.

Now there is nothing inherently wrong with that if you want to be not only an author but a publisher as well with the set of skills publishers need to succeed in a highly competitive market. You might name your enterprise Three Stooges Company and serve it as writer, editor, and publisher. Today, almost everyone who has read a bestseller seems to be a frustrated author. Thousands of entrepreneurs stand ready to help you, for a fee, to design an attractive book in a world where books and people are judged by their covers. Yes, trash may sell very well. A few good books do make it to the top. What's new?

The question is, “What is good?” The history of best sellers informs us that most of them are forgotten, and the classical works that have persisted have done so largely because they have been curated by persons who allegedly have superior taste.

I recall an author who gained the Amazon system with his photo book comprising a photograph of his foot. A good title for the second edition of that book would have been My Bestselling Foot. Amazon booted him, but, lo and behold, a legit publisher got him to create a real best seller, a photo album of several images of his feet. He donated the proceeds to charity. You see, he had discovered a weakness in the algorithm that allowed him to have a best-selling book with sales of $3.

Mind you that you may be practically illiterate to succeed as an Amazon KDP book publisher. You can invest some capital in hiring ghost writers for so much a word. That would hardly be novel. Recall that Alexandre Dumas had a book-writing factory. He would go to the office and dictate a plot to his scribblers. Today the independent publisher can hire writers and all the experts needed to produce and market books.

The Amazon Machine is capitalizing on the desire of almost everyone to be a writer. Only a few of them are commercial writers whose incentive is money. Why, many authors of the world's most enduring books did not make their living writing. Their works were not popular in their own time. Wealth, or patrons, or modest jobs, and even poverty provided them with enough leisure time to write. Authors ancient and modern survived the best they could. We may recall again that copyright is a rather new intangible right. Publishing monopolies with power of the printing presses held the first copyright. The financial benefit to their chosen authors was minimal. Technological and political progress eventually provided writers with the right have their works copied by various means and to be paid for it. Scribblers gained some income, but the main incentive for communicating one's ideas publicly is hardly money.

No, money in itself has never been the main motive of authors although quite a few of them have hoped for fortune with fame. In fact, writers have paid to get their works published and have been called vain by persons obsessed with money for doing so. Just getting published may be benefit enough, as a publisher pointed out in the famous copyright case, Williams and Wilkins versus the United States, the trial for which began on September 9th, 1970, regarding the mass copying of medical journals without payments to the authors. At the hearing before the commissioner, it was asserted that the authors were not being paid. "We published their material," was the response, Wasn't that payment enough for the authors of the medical research papers? They even paid for their articles to be published in the medical journal 

In an aside, the Supreme Court Justice on appeal noted, "In particular, the trial judge has, I think, clearly demonstrated that the claimed 'single-copy-per-request' limitation is both illusory and unrealistic. He has found, and it is not disputed, that the libraries will duplicate the same article over and over again, even for the same user, within a short space of time." (Williams Wilkins Company v. United States, 487 F.2d 1345).

The allusion to “illusion” might be better said: The imagined limitation was an illusion, something generally perceived as real but factually unreal. But, then, “and unrealistic” should be “or unrealistic.” Why not just say “unrealistic”? And it might also be said that the ability to enforce the limitation eluded the librarians. Never mind, though, we know what the judge meant.

Expert or not, and whether relevant to income or not, I maintain that traffic counts on books posted would certainly be helpful. A library can tell you how many times your book has been check out. Now Amazon can tell you how many times someone has touched your book on its virtual bookshelf, and even more than that could be told. Traffic statistics would indicate to authors the real value of the free promotional programs offered by Amazon KDP: loaning out books, giving away books, reducing their price to as low as .99. One might think that Amazon would report those counts because the Machine would make even more money since it gets a substantial cut of sales, and authors would be more pleased to post their books. Why is the truth eluding us? Is Amazon hiding it because its free promotional programs and even the paid ones, are gimmickry to get free content?

Yes, indeed, traffic counts, whether or not you are in it for the money.

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